Bellamy modernizes
System i solution and makes 30 sales in 6 months!
Background
Bellamy
Software, based in Edmonton, Alberta is the
largest supplier of municipal systems software
in that Province and has provided systems and
support services to the public sector market in
Canada for more than 28 years.
Established in 1979, and recently acquired by Sylogist
in May of 2006, Bellamy develops, implements and supports
a fully integrated line of software solutions for the
public sector and serves over 80 customers including cities,
towns,
counties, school boards and regional utilities, primarily
in Western Canada. Their suite of software includes :
- Municipal
Finance, Operations and
Services
- School
Board Finance, Operations, Records Management, Payroll
and HRIS
- Utilities
Billing and
Financial Accounting, and a host
of other services
They sell and service IBM i5OS (System i) servers and
related hardware and IBM software products. Other partners
include Alpha (US), DKTek (Canada), IMI (Europe), MuRho
(Asia) and F5 Networks.
As indicated above, Bellamy was acquired in May 2006 by
Sylogist Ltd, who develop, install, integrate and maintain
enterprise management software systems for mid-size public
and private sector organizations. Sylogist is a publicly
traded company on the TSX Canadian Venture Exchange under
the symbol ‘SYZ’, and has its HQ in Calgary,
Alberta with branch offices in Edmonton, Vancouver and
Atlanta.
Sylogist is an integration partner for SAP, the world’s
leading software manufacturer of ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) software and they work with other leading software
and hardware providers to provide end-to-end application
and infrastructure solutions, experience and expertise.
Their key focus is to help customers further realize the
value of their investments in enterprise systems, by providing
very specific consulting expertise and products that complement
and extend this powerful, integrated environment. The Bellamy
acquisition and that of Collaborative Learning Network
Inc. (CLN) in August 2006, makes Sylogist Ltd the largest
provider of municipal ERP solutions in Canada.
Problem
The difficulties
associated with maintenance and deployment with Bellamy's existing
modernization tools, had
become
unacceptably complex and costly. The delays incurred
whilst
waiting
for change requests to pass through the competitors support
team,
and getting them readied for client-wide deployment,
were further delaying the launch of new features and
upgrades.
A
way had to be found to circumvent this maintenance step
and
ensure a speedy and cost-effective deployment to
the
customer
base.
Further, a factor of demographics which is hitting Bellamy’s
clients – and indeed is becoming a reality for many
System i shops – is that many clients had
been on the System i platform for more than 20 years.
These organizations are starting to undergo significant
staff
turnover as the Baby Boomer generation begins to reach
retirement age. The loss of these knowledgeable resources
means new – and younger - replacements are being
hired who have no knowledge of the operation of a 5250
based RPG application. Green screens – what the
heck are they?! This had become a major disadvantage
for Bellamy’s
products and they needed to move to a web-based interface
quickly.
Despite rich workflows and functionality of the product,
Bellamy
had to constantly try to
overcome perceptions of 5250 screens as outdated technology,
with their competitors easily picking on the text-based
screens and what was perceived as the awkward processing
of information. Bellamy had to find a way to quickly and
cost-effectively re-introduce a wholly new and updated
look and feel, whilst retaining the excellent software
business logic embedded in their applications.
"We also needed a way to integrate with MS Office
desktop applications which are so prevalent in the typical
office environments we service. Simple functionality
like emailing, archiving, data transfer and form letters
were
lacking in our 5250 world. We needed a way to provide
end-users with easy access to and simple integration
with Word, Outlook
and Excel," said Ken Shelton, General Manager
at Bellamy.
"Having assessed what we needed to ensure the ongoing
primacy of our market position, we could tell that looksoftware’s
solution was exactly what we needed as it offered us
a quick and somewhat painless entry into web services,
SOA
and composite application extension," said Ken.
It was important that Bellamy be able to offer new and
easier ways to access data securely and in a predictable
manner and that it was perceived as an ‘open for
business’ application suite. They needed SOA capabilities
and web services to bring that about.
webView 2.0 provides modern, intuitive
access to the RPG back-end
The selection process
A number of competitive offerings were evaluated.
After doing
further web research and reviewing various press articles,
Bellamy came across looksoftware. It
seemed at first glance that the whole suite offered by looksoftware
was relevant to their needs including newlook, centric, soarchitect,
lookserver, smartclient, thinclient
and mobileclient!
The combination of fast time to market, improved future
functionality, proven track record and cost effectiveness,
were all very attractive and exactly what Bellamy needed. “When
comparing these factors to the other vendors, we found
looksoftware so easy to do business with. They were friendly
and open to the needs we presented in order to fit within
our business model,” said Ken.
It all came together very quickly after that, thanks to
the ‘easy to do business with’ nature of looksoftware.
They met all requirements of a dynamic architecture,
ease of use, functionality, integration capabilities and
the
need
to access the presentation, application
and
data layers. newlook was found to
be
faster
and
more accurate than the manual work that would normally
be
done to get the alternatives
to operate in a similar fashion.
“The development environment looksoftware offered
was reuse based and allowed easy extension and enhancement
while other vendors we’re promoting proprietary
languages aimed more at redevelopment than reuse. Overall,
the project from start to finish has been much less daunting
with looksoftware than what we envisaged with any other
vendor, said
Ken.
The solution
Bellamy was in a rush to say the least! They had three
weeks left before the unveiling at the biggest event of
the year - The Bellamy Partnership Forum. This is an annual
event with 250 clients gathering for three days. The opening
address would highlight their new direction and new user
interface.
It was agreed that a prototype would be developed. It
would be shown at the show and would be stable enough to
allow all three days of presentations to use and highlight
the applications within the new interface. Nick Hampson,
looksoftware’s designer, worked
remotely with the Bellamy team during the run-up to the
event. With
Nick’s help and a lot of late hours back at the ranch,
the prototype was ready in time for a triumphant and exciting
opening address at the forum!
Following that initial launch, Bellamy attended three
days of training with looksoftware in
Costa Mesa. Those three days enabled the team to forge
ahead with phase II
of the development plan. They’ve found that as
they get more advanced and comfortable with the looksoftware
suite, they have been able to bounce ideas and challenges
off looksoftware’s support and
development team. “They have
been extremely supportive and helpful with all our
development
needs. We recently had
the development manager onsite in Canada for three
days helping with phase III of our plans, including
dipping
our toes into web services, SOA and hand-held functionality”,
said Ken.
"It’s amazing how quickly our team has
become productive
with looksoftware - from nothing to
a functioning prototype in three weeks! said
Werner Biegler, President and CEO. "It’s
important that we continue to develop more functionality
and improve
the end-user experience, thereby keeping our product
suite at the forefront of delivering what our customers
need,” Werner
said.
webView 2.0 presents all customer
information
in a single view – including System i data, non-structured
objects like documents, spreadsheets and images and
web based information like mapping.
Benefits
Web deployment now makes it so much easier to deploy the
software to their diverse and widespread customer base.
All clients are smart clients, and there will be some
mobile functionality coming soon. With desktop integration,
there
is new email functionality, document archiving, spawning
letters, data transfer enhancements etc. A major new benefit
of the modernized applications is that Bellamy has been
able to combine
multiple components of different applications into more
easily manageable, tabbed interfaces.
“looksoftware has significantly
improved our System i application competitiveness. Yes
for sure, we can now
not only offer a modern look and feel, as well as integration
with MS Office, new and easier user workflows, mobility
and web services with SOA. Indeed we expect our looksoftware
application will drive future hardware sales for us
and
IBM,” said Werner. “This will
not
only enable us to hold our own in our existing customer
base, but will
drive new business our way, and even allow us to have
an On Demand SaaS (Software As A Service) solution
as an alternative service to
our customers.”
Although it’s still early days for Bellamy with
looksoftware, the results are very positive.
Within 6 months of making the new applications available,
30 sales have been made! This rapid adoption is a direct
result of a client perception that end-users will more
readily embrace the graphical user interface versus the
5250 screens. Clients perceive less maintenance and upkeep
of the GUI than with the previous solution.
“looksoftware has helped us
retain a number of clients who were looking elsewhere
and we have recently won three
new clients who probably wouldn't even have
considered us with our 5250 screens!” said
Ken.
The newly branded ‘webView 2.0’ offers the
most reliable and cost-effective, unified management solution
for municipalities, school boards and regional energy
authorities in Canada – and, with their philosophy
of accommodating a high level of customization in order
to achieve a tighter fit for their customers, Bellamy
is onto a sure fire winner!
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